Sony secures half a million eBooks from Google

Amazon may be winning the popularity vote with its Kindle eBook reader, but Sony now clearly hold the title for most eBooks available through its Sony Reader Digital Book. That’s due to a deal the Japanese company has done to make 500,000 new eBooks available from Google’s collection.{ad}

Google has been scanning books and publications for almost 5 years now, but the only ones it is allowed to share are those whose copyrights have expired. That means the new works on offer for Sony’s reader will be quite old, or just not covered by copyright.

For comparison Amazon has around 250,000 eBooks available for the Kindle and Kindle 2, but these are more modern books and they continue to add new releases to the line-up. Sony may have more books, but arguably Amazon has more relevant and popular books.

Steve Haber, president of the digital reading business at Sony commented:

We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible, and our partnership with Google is another step in that direction … We would love to continue working with Google to see how we can get more content for Reader owners.

No financial details about this new deal between the two companies have been released.

Matthew’s Opinion
I don’t think being able to state you have the most books really helps your cause unless you are offering all the books people want. That includes all the classics and all new releases.

EBooks are still in their infancy in terms of becoming a mainstream activity and regular purchase for consumers. For eBooks to become truly mainstream though, physical book releases need to be matched with digital versions. This is happening, but has a long way to go before it is one-to-one. We will surely see a few hardware iterations before it does happen too.

It’s also interesting to note that Google may play a big role in the eBook business in the future. It does after all have a huge collection of digital works it can distribute for a price. It may also get into the business of handling the licenses of copyright works for digital distribution depending on how publishers continue to react to them scanning works.